(Item 3): Press Article, (Excerpt), Hinckley Times, May 29^th., 2008 - The truth is out…in outer space…

Motorists swerved to the side of the road. People out walking hastened home. Housewives closing curtains stopped halfway. There was a ripple effect across the county as the three lights in the sky glided silently overhead. In Burbage, a school caretaker unsheathed his Super 8 camera and caught whatever it was on film. On Monday, October 23^rd., 1978. Hundreds, possibly thousands, were left flummoxed at the sight of an Unidentified Flying Object above Leicestershire. News of the UFO soon spread. By Thursday, October 26^th., the first of three stories reached the Leicester Mercury.“Reports are still coming in from all over Leicestershire and beyond following the sighting of a bright ‘delta-shaped’ unidentified flying object last Monday evening,” said a small piece on page 33. Twenty separate sightings, revealed the article, were reported to the Leicester branch of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Research Organisation (of) Leicester, based in Ellesmere Road, Braunstone. “We’ve checked the local airfields and there hasn’t been any configuration of aircraft that it could have been”, said UAPROL spokesman Trevor Thornton. By the following Monday, UAPROL had logged 200 calls. All reported seeing a craft that resembled a silent Vulcan bomber between 6.30 pm and 9.30 pm that night. UFO sightings were recorded above Burton, Measham, Leicester, Hinckley, Coalville and Wigston, and across the border in north Warwickshire.“The response is more phenomenal than the phenomenon”, added Trevor, a hosiery technician. Over the years the case of the silent Vulcan has become well known in UFO circles. But until now, we’ve never looked into what was happening in the night sky above Leicestershire, when the Earth below belonged to the Bee Gees. And it has to be said - 1978 wasn’t just notable for muttered expletives in our verdant corner of the East Midlands. That year, the Ministry of Defence received its largest number of UFO reports to date - 750.It was also the year director Steven Spielberg helped pack out cinemas across Britain with Close Encounters of The Third Kind. The film about alien abduction and visitation had a lasting effect on many people. Among them was 12-year old David Clarke. Now Mr. Clarke, a historian, journalist and author of several books - including UFOs That Never Were and The UFO Files - has unlimited access to the MoD’s UFO material kept with the corridors of the National Archives at Kew. This includes items yet to be digitised and released to the press or public. Dr Clarke, who lectures at Sheffield Hallam University, knows about the county sightings of October 23^rd., 1978.“They are very well known within the UFO community”, he reassures. But this is where our thread starts to unravel. Despite the number of panicked calls to various county based UFO societies, not one individual made an official report to the Mod, the police or the RAF. So, Doctor Clarke, having trawled through the MoD’s yellowing documents filed for that October, came back with little more than dusty hands.“There is nothing in the Mod files for 1978 that is relevant” he says.“That’s not to say the sightings were not genuine, only the people who saw these things clearly did not make an official report. That is the only way the MoD would have known about the sightings - unless something unusual was seen on radar, which it wasn’t in this case.” If Leicestershire’s white-faced witnesses didn’t go to the Old Bill, they did go to the Leicestershire UFO Research Society, founded in 1971. Current Society Chairman Jeff Lord released his recounting of the sightings last September.“Whether or not one believes in UFOs or thinks that they all have a natural explanation“, he says, “Leicestershire’s ‘case of the silent Vulcan’ is one of those cases that has to be regarded as the definite sighting of a highly unusual and quite visible aerial object which can only be classed as ‘unidentified’. Among the society’s interviewees was an air traffic controller working at East Midlands Airport in Castle Donington. Crew and passengers of inbound Maltese Airlines’ flight 706, scheduled to land at 7.30 pm, had reported seeing an aircraft flying below 2,500 feet, within the airport’s flight corridor. The craft did not appear on the airport’s radar system. And while that was interesting, it’s nothing next to the interview with Terry E, then caretaker at Hastings High School in Burbage: Mr. E. filmed the UFO for 30 seconds. “When first seen, the object was very much like a bright star”, he said. “After a minute or so, it started to grow larger. When the object was approximately three quarters of a mile away, I used the 24mm zoom lens on my Super 8 movie camera to enlarge the image”.“Looking at the object through the camera lens, I could just make out what looked like the leading edges of an aircraft’s wings, but they seemed much too thick. As the aircraft passed overhead there was no sound at all. The object was very low and it would have been very easy to hear any engines.” “Mrs. E, Terry’s Mother, contacted RAF Bitteswell, two miles west of Lutterworth, to see if their Vulcan was flying that evening and was told it wasn’t. Further statements came from people in Burbage, Broughton Astley, Littlethorpe, Hinckley, Measham and Market Bosworth. All reported a similarly silent craft. Like Mrs. O, from Carlton, who was driving home at 6.45 pm that evening. “I saw an object which I first thought was a large aircraft, because it had three lights on and my first thought was that it had landing lights on, then I realised that the centre light would cover the whole of the cockpit. The other two lights were set back, and at this point I had stopped my car and got out. I realised that the object was stationary, so I stood and watched. There was no sound. Suddenly, it started to move in my direction very slowly, and I stood and waited until it was above me and I felt that there were windows of some sort around it. At this point I felt afraid, so I got back into my car and drove away”. Mr. R. M, an ex-RAF man in Burbage, also saw something. “At first I thought it to be a Vulcan Aircraft and realised that the lights were stationary. I must have watched for two minutes and then rushed to get my binoculars out of the car which was close to hand. Before I had time to focus, the lights suddenly moved forwards at speed in a northerly direction without noise.”

Jenny Randles is one of Britain’s leading ufologists. The former director of investigations at the British UFO Research Association has probed 20,000 ‘sightings’ over the past 36 years. The silent Vulcan was among them. “In essence there were four separate phases of sightings that night”, she recalls. “Some were caused by a meteor that flashed through the air, but most were focused around the large triangular craft at approximately 7 pm, or assumed craft, as most witnesses just saw three lights at the apex to a triangle and joined the dots presuming them to be on a triangular craft. “Experienced UFO investigation decrees that it is always tricky as humans see order in chaos all the time”. Jenny has also examined the film taken in Burbage by Mr. E.“Another issue to emerge was the matter of height. Assumptions as to size depend on an accurate estimate as to height and that is never possible against a dark sky. “Witnesses notoriously misperceive the height/size equation and this object could easily have been larger and higher. And if higher, its slow speed and lack of noise is less anomalous for a military aircraft because witnesses tended to think it was smaller and lower and so really slow moving and strangely silent.” Jenny, who has written 40 books on UFOs, and investigated sightings across the world, says a pattern soon emerged when they examined where the craft had been spotted.“When we looked at the distribution of the reports they focused around RAF Alconbury which certainly suggested to us a military cause, even though one has never been confessed by the base or thus proven”.RAF Alconbury in Cambridgeshire is under the control of the United States in Europe. This long-held UFO, she believes, was a Cold War stealth aircraft being put through its paces above the Midlands, having set off from the east.“It was several years later, 1988 as I recall, that the USAF stealth aircraft - or ‘Aurora’, was finally admitted to exist, and MoD sources whom I met, one being an undersecretary who had a UFO portfolio, indicated that the USAF had run early tests in the UK and some had occurred from in and around Alconbury.“He was not surprised, though had seen no reports he said, that these tests might have been seen and reported locally as UFOs.” This information was further supported by USAF pilots at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk. Later, while lecturing at RAF Shawbury in Shropshire, RAF crew told her it was a “fairly open secret” that stealth flights had occurred from Alconbury around 1978-1979.“I also spent some time in the United States and spoke with aero engineers in California about Aurora. They said the project first flew in 1977 and several crashes occurred in the early days. So its areas of operation were kept secret. But they knew it flew in Europe from 1978 and the UK was indeed its first overseas base”.The Aurora was eventually revealed to the public in the early ‘90’s, but by now it was old technology.“Its sleek triangular shape fits well with the Silent Vulcan sightings”, nods Jenny, so at that point we concluded this was the most likely explanation for the events. I should add that in the following four weeks there were further reports of the same phenomenon a little further north, in Derbyshire and Staffordshire. Between November 26 and 28 we recorded half a dozen cases and witnesses used terms like: huge triangle, jellyfish and manta ray to describe the large craft they read into the lights. On 26 November one object was tracked via several independent witnesses passing on a track through Coventry, Nuneaton and as far north as Whalley Bridge in Derbyshire”.There is doubt in Jenny’s mind that Leicestershire’s most bizarre UFO sighting is now an IFO - an Identified Flying Object. Jenny now believes that 95% of all cases can be resolved as IFOs.“There have been well over 300 things that have triggered sightings. They range from the commonplace: aircraft lights, space junk burning up and so on, and pass through many phases as technology introduces brand new causes for misperception, such as satellites in the 1960’s, laser displays in the 1980’s, and these days the ubiquitous Chinese lanterns. Of course, 5% of the hundreds of sightings made within the UK alone each year are still unaccounted for. I am persuaded that some of these involve phenomenon on the edge of atmospheric physics and will add to our understanding of the Earth’s geo sphere. I call these things UAP, as the term Unidentified Atmospheric Phenomena clarifies what they are and, more importantly, what they are not, the stereotypical idea of a UFO. I have to say that I have not seen any substantive evidence that any UFO case involves alien technology visiting here. To be honest, the vast majority of what you read in the media is complete twaddle. Of course, there are still unsolved ones and I do think some are likely to be more than just misperceptions. But they are not the kind of exciting UFO that most people assume you mean when you use that term“.“Unsolved is not insoluble“, concludes Jenny, “and it is also not the same thing as extraterrestrial.” (51/77/78/126-193). (7).

(Courtesy of Leicester Mercury newspapers).

A STRANGE triangular object spotted by several witnesses flying over Hinckley is still to be identified. Six people came forward after a mysterious object glided over the town on October 17. Investigators from the Leicestershire UFO Research Society are still trying to fathom what was in the sky at around 8pm that night. Graham Hall from the society said: “The thing that most people noted was that the craft was so low in the sky and was cruising above the rooftops but there wasn’t any loud noise coming from it. “There was just a soft humming and strange whining sound as it approached - it was larger than a normal aircraft, and had a dozen static white lights and a red one. “It is also strange because there were no reports from outside of Hinckley.” The unidentified flying object, which was not caught on camera, was said to be around 1,000 foot in the air. (51/12/48). (8).

(7): The Leicester Mercury/Leicestershire Chronicle

(8): The HinckleyTimes

(35): Loughborough Echo - (The)

Observations Log 1979 -1993 | Observations Log 2004-2011